| By Jayce Bartok "The Cake Eaters" was a term my mother, LeAnn Bartok, used to describe the Golden Boys and Girls growing up in 1950s Pittsburgh. They were the ones who had gotten their dreams fulfilled, their pieces of cake, so to speak. The term always stuck with me. A year after my mom passed away, I found myself going through that process of saying goodbye to someone so close. My brothers, sister and I gathered at our bedraggled Pennsylvania home in need of a new roof, and tried to make sense of everything. In the quiet, I thought about how my mom had always encouraged me to write something. In the frustrating moments as an actor - those moments when you know (or hoped) you wowed them in the audition room, but didn't get the part - she would say, "You need to write something like that Matt Damon kid." So in the fall of 2003, after I married my wife, Tiffany, I began to write something that expressed my deep feelings of a family in flux. I wanted to write great parts for actors, because I knew if the role was interesting enough, the great actors would come. My experience acting in a smaller role in Tom McCarthy's The Station Agent really influenced me. To observe Tom - an actor-turned-writer-turned director - create such a sweet film; made me think it was possible. After four years, numerous drafts and several attempts at getting The Cake Eaters made, my agent suggested I give it to Mary Stuart Masterson, an actress I respected, who I felt would really get the small town feel of the piece. Soon, I found myself sitting across from her at the Old Cedar Tavern in the Village, excitedly discussing the prospect of making a small personal film about two quirky families interconnected by loss. Miraculously, we found a producer willing to finance the film, and went about honing the script with its four varied storylines while dreaming about casting the complex ensemble drama. The core of The Cake Eaters revolves around Georgia, a 16-year-old girl battling an obscure neurological disorder. She is trapped inside her body, gradually losing control over it, but still has these very real, normal, desires. She wants to experience love, be a normal teenager and not be viewed as a victim. The part was partly inspired by watching my mom be trapped inside a diabetes-inspired neuropathy. She was an artist known for her conceptual art in the 1970s, but slowly, painfully, became unable to move. In the film, Georgia (Kristen Stewart) sets her sights on a small-town introvert named Beagle (Aaron Stanford). She convinces him to rescue her, and they run away to a seedy motel room. Although their ages are different, Georgia and Beagle manage to find some piece of a dream. In contrast to this, Beagle's brother, Guy (played by myself), returns from a long absence in NYC struggling to make it as a musician to find his mother has passed away, his girlfriend has moved on, and his brother and father are reluctant to pick up as the happy family. Our dad, Easy (Bruce Dern), has been having a long affair with Georgia's grandmother, Marg (Elizabeth Ashley), all the while. Guy's return brings everything to the boiling point. I must say the hardest part of the process was transitioning from writer to actor. After working so intensely on a very personal script, it took a leap of faith to hand it over to Mary Stuart and walk onto the set without any prior knowledge of having written it. Thankfully, Mary Stuart did a great job of keeping my jobs separate so I could focus. It is my hope that the audience walks away from The Cake Eaters feeling they have inhabited these characters' lives, and they relate to those quiet, subtle moments of transition and emotional shift that happen in all families when there is that sweet reconnection after a long absence, hardship, or loss. Four years later, I feel - as the writer - that is what it was all about for me...exploring how to find your Cake. Premiering The Cake Eaters at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival is an amazing opportunity. The film was conceived and realized in NYC (shot on location in Hudson and Catskill, NY), and so, it is only fitting that it screen here. I had the pleasure of starring in Red Doors, which premiered at the festival in 2005, and was deeply impressed with the diversity of the films and the rapidly growing power and prominence of the festival in NYC, the Mecca of independent filmmaking. I hope to see you at festivals here and around the country with your own films! |
